Cold Water by Dave Hutchinson

Author:Dave Hutchinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

3

Krista was in a cab when the phone rang.

“Turn around and go back and we’ll pretend this never happened,” Jakobson said.

“If I’m not under arrest you have no right to hold me,” Krista told her. She saw the driver glance at her in the rear-view mirror, but that was all right. She wanted him to remember her.

“This really doesn’t make things look good for you,” Jakobson said. “It makes you look guilty.”

“You already think I’m mixed up in this, colonel. That’s why you put me under house arrest, not because you were worried about the papers catching up with me.”

She heard Jakobson sigh. “You went out shopping today. Do you really think I’d have let you do that if I thought you were involved?”

“I was under guard the whole time.”

“Yes, well, I’ll be having a quiet face-to-face with Lieutenant Käsper about that in an hour or so.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” Krista said. “I tricked him.”

“He’s supposed to be better trained than that.”

“You disabled the override on the door so I couldn’t get out,” Krista told her. “Does the key code in the phone only open the door during the daytime, when there’s someone available to babysit?” Silence, at the other end of the connection. “Fine. Well, this is me officially withdrawing my cooperation.”

“Major,” said Jakobson. “Listen to reason.”

Krista hung up. “Pull over here,” she told the driver, rummaging in her bag as if to put her phone back in it but in reality shoving it down the back of the rear passenger seat.

She paid with cash she’d withdrawn at the mall earlier in the day, walked off slowly until the cab had vanished into the evening traffic, watched it carry her phone off into the distance, presumably to an appointment with Jakobson’s people when they finally tracked it down. It probably wouldn’t buy her a lot of time, but it was a breathing space.

So, here she was. Night in Tallinn, snow on the ground and snow swirling in the light of the streetlamps, a fugitive from the police. What she’d done was enough to put a serious reprimand on her career, at the very least. It might very well have ended it. And she had no idea what to do next.

One step at a time. She stopped at a kiosk and bought a cheap phone, slotted in the expansion card onto which she’d copied her old phone, and walked to the nearest bank cashpoint while it took over the new one. She withdrew four thousand euros in cash—almost everything she had in her current account at this point in the month—and took another cab to the other side of town. All these things were trackable, but it would take time and she planned to keep moving.

In a run-down café, she wolfed down a sandwich and a cup of coffee and dithered over whether to call Markus. She decided against it. Things were already bad enough for him; making contact right now could only make them worse.

There was, she thought, really only one place she could go, and she realised she had been trying not to think about it.

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